Nicholas Lossky

Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky (Russian: Никола́й Ону́фриевич Ло́сский; December 6 [O.S. November 24] 1870 – January 24, 1965) was a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher who represented aspects of neo-idealism and metaphysical libertarianism of the Silver Age of Russian pre-Revolutionary and emigré philosophy, in what he termed his own philosophy of intuitive-personalism.

Born in Latvia to an Orthodox Christian father and a Catholic mother, he was expelled from school for promoting atheism. But shortly after the Russian Revolution, in 1918, after escaping from an elevator accident, he became Orthodox under the guidance of his friend and fellow philosopher Fr. Pavel Florensky.

Forced out of his university faculty position in St. Petersburg due to his Christian faith, he emigrated to Czechoslovakia at the invitation of Tomáš Masaryk, and as a professor at the Russian University of Prague in Bratislava became part of a vibrant network of ex-Marxist Russian Orthodox emigré intellectuals in Europe between the wars. After World War II he joined the faculty of St. Vladimir's Seminary, then in New York City, in America, and later moved to Paris where he died.

Drawing on German philosophical discourse in which he became engaged while working on his doctorate in Germany before World War I, he sought to articulate Orthodox Christian traditions of personhood, epistemology, and cosmology in the discourses of modern Western philosophy. HisHistory of Russian Philosophy (1952) is an intellectual history of nineteenth- and early-to-mid-twentieth-century Russian philosophy. It includes a brief but in-depth survey of the philosophical works of Fr. Florensky and Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, examining in particular how the latter's sophic philosophy both drew on Orthodox traditions and came in part to obscure their ontological outlook. It also contrasts Soviet dialectical materialism with traditions of Russian philosophy rooted in Christianity.

Prof. Lossky's legacy includes the work of his son Vladimir Lossky, an Orthodox theological writer, whose philosophical background he helped to form. His most famous university student was the writer and atheist-libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. She said that the elder Lossky was the only one of her professors in Russian whom she remembered, appreciating his teaching on classical philosophy while rejecting what she considered to be his otherworldly Christian mysticism.